From Head-Loading to the Iron Horse: Railway Building in Colonial Ghana and the Origins of Tropical Development

Chapter 8 - The Management System, Personnel and Labour Relations

99 Chapter 8 The Management System, Personnel and Labour Relations Following the British model, a centralised and functionally departmentalised structure was established. However, as the Gold Coast railways were publicly owned, the upper tier of decision taking was not a chairman and board of directors. That responsibility lay with the Secretary of State for the Colonies who set the broad managerial, technical and financial goals. In practice, much of the general policy making originated with the Governor acting as the Secretary of State’s representative. Both men relied on the Crown agents and the consulting engineers for commercial, financial and technical advice. Although the role of the Crown agents was advisory, in practice, because of their wide experience in commercial operations in the Crown Colonies, their opinion was crucial in such important matters as rates and the recruitment of skilled labour. The day-to-day management of the railways was closer to the British model in that a general manager coordinated the activities of the four PDLQ IXQFWLRQDO GHSDUWPHQWV î Locomotive, Maintenance, Traffic and Accounts. These had their headquarters at Sekondi. As the Railway Department operated as one of several branches of the Colonial Civil Service, the entire labour force, including management, were public servants and were therefore directly responsible to the Governor. Figure 8.1 shows the hierarchical administrative arrangements and functional organisation of the Gold Coast railways. There were inherent weaknesses in the administrative arrangements. One concerns the flow of information. In the early days, when communications between Africa and Europe were poor, the system was not conducive to the smooth running of the railways. The general manager, Governor, Secretary of State, Crown agents and consulting engineers were not only geographically remote one from the other but, institutionally too, they operated as discrete entities. Policy proposals made by the general manager at Sekondi, for instance, took weeks to arrive at the seat of the Colonial Government in Accra. Despatches from the Governor could take months to reach the Secretary of State in London who, as a matter of course, referred such matters to the Crown agents. They, in turn, took advice from the consulting engineers, after which recommendations were submitted to the Secretary of State for approval. The proposal then went back to the Governor who had 100 to pass a Bill through the legislative council to give the policy legal backing. The whole cumbersome system was subject to delays and inefficiency but, as Chamberlain pointed out, ‘the safety and, indeed the lives of passengers depended on continuous effective decision-making’.268 The fact that the railways lacked effective decision-making was demonstrated in 1904. In that year, an inquiry by the general manager as to the suitability of wood fuel for the locomotives took a full six months to reach the attention of the Crown agents and consulting engineers. Their advice was that the locomotives should first be provided with spark-boxes and fire-arresters and that suitable wood should be cut and properly dried before being used. In the interim, the railways had started burning the wrong sort of wood without first adapting the locomotives to its use. Figure 8.1 Hierarchical Administrative e Arrangements The result was a number of accidents due to engine failures and a general deterioration in the locomotives.269 One solution was to circumvent the bureaucratic line of communication by allowing the general manager to deal directly with the consulting engineers on technical matters.270 In addition, as the telegraph, steamship and mail services improved during the first decade of the twentieth century, the delays in the flow of information were somewhat eased.271 A more fundamental problem, which was to persist throughout the period under review, was managerial autonomy. There were two main areas of disagreement between railway management in Sekondi and officials in Accra or London. The first concerned railway rates. Because the general Secretary of State Crown Agents Consulting Engineers Governor Legislative Council General Manager Chief Accountant Locomotive Superintendent Traffic Superintendent Maintenance Superintendent 101 manager had no control over tariff policy, the expatriate mining lobby was able, through the Colonial Office, to influence rates in their own interests, and uneconomic rates were imposed. Second, because the Colonial Loans Act 1900 made interest and sinking funds chargeable directly on colonial revenues, the railways did not keep a separate account. Thus, the Colonial Treasury both provided funds for railway maintenance and capital developments, as well as debt charges, and...